The workings of history and the ambiguities of justice have been fruitful themes for author Barry Unsworth. In AFTER HANNIBAL, the characters’ relationships with Italian history imply that all human endeavors are useless, “the same destiny await[s] all human habitations.” In the legal practice of the oracular lawyer Signor Mancini, the novel’s pivotal character whom most of the other characters consult, even the law offers no real justice. However, to extract that bleak message from the fates of these characters, most of them victims of their own flaws—truculence, passivity, greed—seems unnecessarily pessimistic.

Part of the problem lies in the large number of characters who inhabit this little world. With a dozen major characters, the novel scarcely provides space for the drawing to be deep. As a result, the reader never feels an intimate understanding of the characters’ motives. A related problem is that some of the characters are presented with broad satire while others are drawn seriously. The reader must move from comic descriptions of one household’s sexual antics directly to the serious treatment of world history. These mixed modes add to the novel’s thematic fogginess.

AFTER HANNIBAL demonstrates Unsworth’s passion for history as well as his love for the landscapes of Italy, and its plot cleverly interrelates the fates of the diverse people who live along one small access road. Nevertheless, its mixed modes and its lack of thematic clarity make it less artistically successful than Unsworth’s previous novels SACRED HUNGER (1992) or MORALITY PLAY (1995).

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIII, February 1, 1997, p. 927.

Chicago Tribune. March 9, 1997, XIV, p. 4.

Library Journal. CXXII, February 1, 1997, p. 108.

London Review of Books. XVIII, December 12, 1996, p. 28.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. March 9, 1997, p. 2.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, March 9, 1997, p. 30.

The New Yorker. LXXIII, June 2, 1997, p. 89.

The Observer. September 1, 1996, p. 15.

The Spectator. CCLXXVII, August 24, 1996, p. 23.

The Times Literary Supplement. August 30, 1996, p. 24.

The Wall Street Journal. February 25, 1997, p. A20.

When, two hundred years before the common era, Hannibal and his troops ambushed the Roman army on the shores of Lake Trasimeno, they took advantage of the natural circumstances of the marsh and mists through which the Romans were marching. Other sorts of warfare have also been practiced in and around Perugia. After Hannibal, the city was ruled first by Biordo Michelotti, who, perhaps betrayed by his newlywed wife, was murdered by members of a rival family, the Guidalotti (assisted by Pope Boniface). The Guidalotti were followed by the even more powerful and brutal Baglioni family, who safeguarded their supremacy by controlling the city’s land.

Professor Monti’s academic interest in the bloody history of power politics in medieval Italy supplies the reader with the history which forms the background of After Hannibal. The events of the novel ask the reader to keep that bloody history in mind as Unsworth plays out his characters’ own battles for love and land. Of the two issues, love occupies fewer characters. Professor Monti feels betrayed by his wife’s sudden decision to leave him for another man. Deeply absorbed in his historical studies, Monti was unaware of any causes for his wife’s unhappiness, and now he feels paralyzed by her absence. He withdraws into himself, teaching his classes but staying away from his university colleagues for fear they will sense what is wrong.

Monti’s neighbor, Fabio, has been similarly betrayed by his lover, Arturo. Like Monti, Fabio was blind to his lover’s unhappiness. He imagined that the younger man was grateful to him for taking him from the slums into a life of comparative ease. Instead, Arturo’s belief that Fabio rules their household tyrannically and that he himself is unappreciated has led him not only to abandon his lover but also to set a legal trap that will strip Fabio of the house and land he has spent his life’s savings to possess.

Land is significant here. Monti and Fabio and all the other characters of the novel live along the same small, private road. It has no outlet; it serves only to give the residents access to their land, and they must maintain it. The road’s only “native” inhabitants are the Checchetti, a peasant family—father, daughter, and son-in-law. Apparently motivated by greed, they initiate a conflict over the road by claiming that, during work on the Chapmans’ house, heavy traffic weakened their property’s wall. Harold Chapman, crass and bullying, is not the sort of person to give in quietly to demands for money; he begins a series of countermeasures which escalates the conflict. At last he consults Signor Mancini, the lawyer who becomes a focus for the various conflicts in which many of the road’s other residents find themselves.

Harold Chapman’s problems, however, do not lie in land alone. While the road dispute escalates, his marriage is dissolving, a fact which he begins to recognize without regret. He has come to despise his wife’s sympathy for Italy: its art, its architecture, and its natives. He spends all his energies trying to enlist his neighbors in his legal battles against the Checchetti family, who are meanwhile using their own wiles to attempt to close off the road.

Another sort of battle for land is also being waged on the road at the home of the Greens, who have recently retired to Italy from the United States. They have purchased a villa which represents for them all that they love about their adopted country. They especially love Umbria, an area rich in the early Renaissance art for which the Greens share a passion. Yet living in Italy has its drawbacks: The Greens have not been able to find satisfactory workmen to renovate their villa, and thus they fall into the grasp of Stan Blemish, who offers to serve as their “project manager.” Blemish, who has lost his job in the English civil service for taking bribes, now makes his living by bilking people like the Greens. Working with a dishonest contractor, Blemish carefully gauges the amount of money he can wring from his victims while the contractor undertakes a number of needless and destructive measures which are supposed to protect the house from earthquakes. The projects, largely uncompleted, leave the house less and less habitable until the Greens’ growing fears cause them to consult the lawyer Mancini.

The rapacious Blemish has plans of his own. He and his wife Milly intend to open a medieval-style restaurant, the plans for which grow ever more elaborate and tasteless each time Blemish locates a new victim. Milly is an earth mother who has no interest in business. She spends her time developing pseudo-medieval recipes and playing elaborately costumed sexual games with her husband.

In the midst of these passions, one resident of the road goes silently about his business. Anders Ritter works relentlessly at the hard physical labor of clearing the tangled brush on his hillside; work functions as therapy after his breakdown in a way that alcohol failed to do. Like Professor Monti, Ritter’s mind is occupied by history; in Ritter’s case, World War II provides the examples of blood and betrayal. During the war, young Ritter and his mother had lived in Rome, where his father, a Nazi officer, had been stationed. During that time, Ritter’s only friend disappeared. In adulthood, Ritter has come to understand that his father gave the orders for the murder of his friend’s uncle along with more than three hundred other Italians. Before he disappeared, Ritter’s friend accused Ritter’s father of causing the uncle’s death. Ritter’s father dispassionately explained to his son that the executions were “necessary.”

Ritter’s adult life has been marked by two stages. The first was his career as a simultaneous translator, a career which ended with a mental breakdown, the result of his growing belief that language is a treacherous instrument of betrayal and rationalization, just as his father had tried to justify the murders he had ordered. Now, in the second stage, Ritter lives in near silence, eking out a subsistence life on his land and keeping to himself. He alone, having no car, is unconcerned about the Checchetti’s blockading of the road. He is, however, concerned about the secrets which his land seems to hold. At the end, the land testifies more loudly than words to another set of wartime murders through the discovery of the execution site of several local men. In uncovering the spot, Ritter somehow exorcises the demons of his father’s actions fifty years before.

The lawyer Mancini is the pivotal figure in the novel; like the road, he brings together most of the main characters and introduces the novel’s central themes concerning the ambiguities of justice. Mancini is a mysterious, almost oracular figure; even his age is impossible to guess. His view of his clients’ various problems is lofty and detached. When he offers them advice, he does so with a cynical view of the workings of Italian law and often withholds from them the ramifications of the actions he recommends. His detachment is heightened by his clients’ often unrealistic expectations of how the law can operate. Mancini, with his cosmic view of human affairs, sees all history as a “regression of falsehoods and deceptions” extending back to “God’s pact with Adam.” Such a situation makes plenty of work for lawyers.

The results of Mancini’s advice, however, are as ambiguous as the law itself. Fabio may be able to save his title to his property, but only at the cost of a lawsuit for fraud. The Greens (partly because their rebellion against Blemish comes too late) lose their house and seem destined to a dull retirement in Florida. Harold Chapman’s victory over the Checchetti family is Pyrrhic at best. Mancini’s clients actually fare no better than those who have not consulted him. The sense of reintegration which Ritter achieves is the result of his own confrontation with the past. Monti, the novel’s most conscious historian, seems suddenly uncertain how to respond to his wife’s tentative offer to return; he fears losing his position of moral superiority.

The workings of history and the ambiguities of justice have been fruitful themes for Unsworth. Sacred Hunger (1992) looked at the immoral joining of commerce and slavery. Morality Play (1995) used a medieval setting to examine justice in a murder case. In After Hannibal, the meanings of the characters’ relationships with history are unclear unless Unsworth means simply that all human endeavors are useless. That, after all, seems to be the conclusion of Monti, Mancini, and Ritter, the novel’s most thoughtful characters. They find a sort of bitter consolation in the idea that the world has always been as it is now, a den of betrayal and deception with power the main motive everywhere. Toward the end, Monti thinks about Perugia:

Someday all this too would be levelled to the ground. That was perhaps the condition we are all ultimately destined to, razed, blank, at peace—the peace of demolition with no walls left standing to shelter our illusions.

Yet to extract this bleak message from the fates of these characters, most of them victims of their own flaws—truculence, passivity, greed—seems unnecessarily pessimistic.

Part of the problem lies in the large number of characters who inhabit the little world of the road. With ten or twelve major characters to draw, the novel scarcely provides space for the drawing to be deep. As a result, the reader never feels an intimate understanding of the characters’ motives. Why are the Greens so trusting of the egregious Blemish? Why does Monti suddenly fear the loss of the upper hand in his marriage? What prevented Cecilia Chapman from noticing her husband’s boorishness long ago?

A related problem is that some of the characters, notably Harold Chapman and the Blemishes, are presented with broad satire, while others are drawn seriously. The reader must move from the Blemishes’ sexual antics to Stan Blemish’s loathing of the people whose lives he is ruining, and from Chapman’s inaccurate quotations directly to the serious treatment of world history. These mixed modes add to the novel’s thematic fogginess.

After Hannibal demonstrates Unsworth’s passion for history as well as his love for the landscapes of Italy, and its plot cleverly interrelates the fates of the diverse people who live along the road. Nevertheless, its mixed modes and its lack of thematic clarity make it less artistically successful than novels such as Sacred Hunger and Morality Play.

Sources for Further Study

Booklist. XCIII, February 1, 1997, p. 927.

Chicago Tribune. March 9, 1997, XIV, p. 4.

Library Journal. CXXII, February 1, 1997, p. 108.

London Review of Books. XVIII, December 12, 1996, p. 28.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. March 9, 1997, p. 2.

The New York Times Book Review. CII, March 9, 1997, p. 30.

The New Yorker. LXXIII, June 2, 1997, p. 89.

The Observer. September 1, 1996, p. 15.

The Spectator. CCLXXVII, August 24, 1996, p. 23.

The Times Literary Supplement. August 30, 1996, p. 24.

The Wall Street Journal. February 25, 1997, p. A20.